House of Many Gods (34 page)

“Ben says he was handsome. After his death his folks moved far away.”

“Come.” Niki pulled her down beside the grave.

She didn’t cry. Instead, she thought of her mother. “I think she loved
him. Or, maybe he was her way of paying back her parents. As I told you, they waited sixteen years to tell her who she was. Whose child she was. All that time, she thought her mother was her sister.”

Niki shrugged. “Sixteen is not so late. Look how interesting her life became, made deeper by truths it did not have before.”

“I don’t think she saw it that way. She saw cruelty and lies. She turned her back on them, had me, then ran away.”

“Imagine. A simple girl, taking off across the sea. How scared she must have been.”

“She was never simple. And probably nothing could ever shock her again. Nothing could be added to her, or taken away.”

“Except you. She came back, saw you fighting for your life, and realized how much she love you.”

Ana neutralized her voice with a calmness bordering on meditation. “Niki, she doesn’t even know me. Probably, she has never loved.”

He gazed at her. “You say she never sacrifice, never pay for what she has. How do you know what her life has been in California?”

Ana looked into the distance. “Maybe you’re right. When she was here, a great sea of what I didn’t know opened up before me. She had been married, then he died. We didn’t really talk about it. One thing I learned: Parts of me
are
like my mother. Our childhoods were similar, both abandoned in a way, so we both learned to be survivors. We’re both vain. She said women like us don’t possess the ‘sorry’ gene. And, it is hard for us to trust.”

“You have trusted me a little.”

“Only a little. So much about you puzzles me.”

“
Da
. I understand your fear. Depending on another human creates much expectations, very troubling atmosphere.”

Ana leaned back on her elbows. “We try so hard
not
to be like our parents. Yet, like my mother, I have gone my own way. Folks have learned to leave me alone. I have my apartment, all the privacy I need. When I want family, I go home to Nanakuli. Maybe I’ll just spend my life observing, taking stock of other humans.”

“This would be a tragic thing.”

“Why? I’m achieving what I set out to achieve. I’ve regained my health. I’ve never felt so balanced in my life.”

“Yes, Ana. You are truly admirable. I think everyone would like to have their lives so under control as you.”

She looked to see if he was joking, but he seemed earnest.

“I had to earn that control, Niki. When they first told me I had cancer,
the only relief I found was lying awake at night planning my suicide.”

“Stop, please!” he cried. “Don’t you understand what life is? Just
being
is a miracle, a gift.”

He pulled her down so they lay side by side, looking at the sky. After a while he began to sing an old Russian song about a broken soldier coming home from war. As he sang, he translated it for her.

“…  His family dead. His home blown up. His fields and livestock gone. Everything he love is gone. He is so weary. He puts rifle in his mouth, wanting to end it. Then it begins to rain … He sees something on ground in front of him, one single leaf on dead plant. Then he sees leaf move. Sees it slowly turn its underside up to receive this rain. He puts his rifle down …”

He fell silent, then he sang another song, his voice sounding so sentimental she thought of a picturesque drunk poised, hand to his heart, under a balcony. Still, Ana would recall that day in detail, Niki beside her at her father’s grave, their heads pressed together, the sky going on and on above them until, where the earth curved, the sky touched the tips of Niki’s shoes tied with broken laces. She would recall his voice floating out among the dead, telling them they were remembered.

That night they were so full of emotion, at first they lay still. Then he leaned up in the dark and kissed her shoulder, her breast, and then her scars. He moved down and kissed her belly, and laid his face there as if listening for a code. His face tipped down. His tongue gently probed then slid inside her, moving back and forth, so little satellites exploded in her brain. A radiance ran down her spine.

She moaned, and grasped his head with both hands and he kept probing with his tongue, as if there were something inside her he must find, something that would give him answers. Her moans became protracted until she shouted out. Finally, Niki reared up on his knees, and laid his chest warm on hers, letting their skin experience the static poem of texture, rough and smooth, dark and light, the minor symphony of sound, skin rubbing skin. The miracle of that skin expanding and contracting, fever-flushed, then chilled.

Then Ana reached down and gently wrapped her hand around him, guiding him. The outline of his shoulders hunched in concentration as he lowered himself down farther and, moving gently, found his way. Her legs went up around his chest, she arched her back, then pulled him closer.

“Niki.”

His hands under her buttocks, he moved inside her until he was deep
as he could be. They slowed down then, rocking back and forth in rhythm while he crooned softly, memorializing this moment, him and her, and this, and this, and nothing more. His pace changed, quickening, and Ana clung to him, feeling the sudden cataracts, the spasms. Then he was shouting, his words seeming to run ahead of him.

“I am yours. I am so very yours.”

N
OW SHE FELT SELF-CONSCIOUS AND VULNERABLE, AND SO SHE
was relieved when he left for the coast to spend time with Gena and Lopaka. They drove him to strategic points from which he shot footage of armed military guards, electrified fences surrounding arsenals in the hills of Lualualei. He went deep into Mākua Valley, dodging military patrols, shooting sites of ancient
heiau
, sacred land transmogrified into cratered holes in shocked, parched earth. He shot footage of live bombs—unexploded ordnance lying in the woods—waiting to blow up in the hands of scavenging children.

He returned to Honolulu exhausted, and Ana took him home, laundering his clothes while he slept. She bought new laces for his shoes, then changed her mind and bought him new shoes. She reversed a fraying collar on a shirt. When they made love again, she identified what she felt as passion and affection, nothing more.

N
IGHT AUGURING TOWARD DAWN, THE SKY PART FLESH
. T
HE BAY A
great kettle seething with fog. It is a view she cherishes, in a city she has come to love. At night, hills round the bay glitter like coals of fiery lava flung into the wind. Then dawn extinguishes the coals, the gray fog lifts. The bay, a prismed diamond.

She always wakes at this hour, an hour that takes solitude to its purest extreme. A dreamlike time where she feels, but does not quite acknowledge, the cold, ethereal strangeness of being palpably alone. She has been alone for years now, has tasted solitude to the dregs. And maybe that will be her fate. Still, she finds joy in her work, and in travel. The going and doing, the convulsive motion, the courage to want to penetrate life—break out of one’s living shell—that is still the challenge.

Sometimes she enters Max’s rooms, each thing untouched, the same. Silk scarves with hand-stitched labels, “
A. Sulka, 2 Rue de Castiglione, Paris
,” embroidered on them in cursive. Cashmere sweaters retaining the scent of his cologne. She holds a sweater to her face. And it’s all right, it is enough to have been loved so well, and to remember.

Now she wraps her body in an amber-palmed kimono, then brushes her dark hair, the middle part covertly gray. She sits down, inclines her head, and tries to begin a letter. There are nights when she has called her daughter on the phone, but such conversations leave her stranded. She does all the talking, Ana merely listens. She prefers writing letters, letting the blank page before her silently instruct her. She has discovered that certain things remain unknown to her until she writes them down.
In that way, she sees what she has chosen to omit. Which is equally revealing.

Sometimes Anahola writes through an entire night. What matter if she misses a night’s sleep? She is alone now, she can do anything she wants. In that sense, she is still who she always was—a rather self-indulgent woman, but one with ambition, a curiosity about the larger world, the knowledge that each moment is her life.

Yet, some shift in attitude has taken place within her. Max’s words keep haunting her.
What good are life’s experiences if we don’t pass them on to our children?
Now when she writes to Ana, she is someone she has never imagined—a mother, trying to give motherly advice. Sometimes she wonders, is she saying too much? Offering too much? She tries not to sound too candid or too blunt, not wanting to remind the girl, “…  you are part of me, like it or not.”

Midsentence she leans back, closes her eyes, and prays. That God will look down on her daughter, see that she has paid enough, been tested enough, and will leave her alone. Then she broods over the letter. It is always an exhausting task. Profound exertion in the writing, and rewriting, and then the anguish of wondering how it is received. For they are never answered, not one in over thirty years.

Ana glanced at the handwriting on the envelope. In the past few years, the letters began to arrive more frequently. The woman had no husband now, maybe she wrote these letters in order to exist more convincingly.

Through the years she had tried but could never
not
read her mother’s letters, could never entirely turn her back on her, perhaps out of curiosity
mingled with awe. She still wrote on thick, expensive stationery on which her perfume lingered and haunted. Five thousand miles away, and she still
announced
her presence.

Ana skimmed over the letter, then got up and made a drink, remembering the adolescent years when she had hated the woman. When she had hate to burn.
What happened to that hate?
Perhaps she had come to see her mother as a free pass: no one could judge Ana too harshly because she had been abandoned as a child. In return, her hate had matured into a wariness and deep resentment.